Grand Theft Auto V Isn’t As Grand As You Think

There’s a classic moment in the BBC show “Fawlty Towers” when Basil Fawlty, played by John Cleese, is trying to placate a travel-weary couple from California as his wife Sybil makes small-talk.

“Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton were just telling me about California,” Sybil says to her husband. “You can swim in the morning and then in the afternoon you can drive up into the mountains and ski.”

“It must be rather tiring,” Basil quips in response.

“Tiring” is one way to describe GTA V, a new video game that Rockstar Games claims is larger than its last three games combined. Walking from one end of a world of such scope feels like a trek, and it shows on your protagonists, whose backs become shiny with sweat whenever you ask them to jog too far.

“There’s launching other games, and then there’s launching Grand Theft Auto” is how a company representative put it to me in one of the rare moments I managed to get them on the phone. You can’t deny him any more than you can dismiss the stature of “Grand Theft Auto.” In three days, the game sold more than many of its peers will in their entire life on the market. It beat its chief commercial competitor, Call of Duty, to $1 billion by 12 days. It’s predecessor helped push author and critic Tom Bissell into a spiraling addiction to cocaine and video games, and the new game has already forced game critics to question the very nature of their craft when they’re not too busy mainlining the game in weekend-long binges. Kanye West may call himself “the nucleus” of contemporary culture, but it’s hard to imagine even Yeezus devouring his own critics this way.

For an industry that’s spent most of its life vying for mainstream approbation, the irrefutability of GTA V is no small victory. But anyone that’s truly passionate about video games has to be left wondering: why this game, and why now?

If you talk to many of its fans, you’d think the answer lies in Rockstar delivering on a decades-old promise that game developers have made to their fans to construct “persistent, living worlds,” a buzzword now so replete in the game industry that it’s become clear it speaks more to the aspirations of video games than their reality. But the lure of that promise is still there: a game that’s not really a game at all. A game that’s more like life, except without all the unpleasantness of mortality and social norms. “Go anywhere, do anything,” chants the mantra.

“Yeah, they are wrong,” Ian Bogost, a philosopher and video game scholar at Georgia Institute of Technology, told me when I put the question to him. “You can’t do much in GTA. But it fools people into thinking they can, which is genius.”

And how does it trick them, exactly?

“Well, it appears to have more affordances than it does, and most people don’t try to pursue the others, so they don’t notice how constrained it really is,” he said.

So what can you do in GTA V? When you first step into the world of Los Santos after a brief narrative preamble, everything seems to be in abundance. Even the way that the game allows players to swap between the three player characters Michael (a retired bank robber about to leave retirement), Trevor (a meth dealer who’s all Heisenberg), and Franklin (an aspiring high-class criminal), shows the studio’s appreciation for the micro and macro versions of its world: the camera pans out, snapping upward several times to show a birds-eye network of highways or city blocks, then zeroes back in a few miles away to one of your other avatars, sitting at home watching TV or cursing at a traffic jam.

Other games might fly you around the world and show you exciting things, no doubt. But they’ve always maintained the artifice of action movie setpieces. Step a few feet in the wrong direction in Call of Duty, and you’ll accidentally fail the mission. Drive up and down the coast for hours in GTA V, and nothing will tell you not to. See a mountain in the distance? Go check it out. Why not?

Rockstar Games

Image from Grand Theft Auto V.

But once you get there, you can’t actually ski. You can swim, sure. Ever since 2004′s “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas,” characters started flapping their little polygonal limbs once they hit the water rather than just flailing and dying, their sad and frustrating fate for GTA III and Vice City. And there are a number of other impressive activities available for those times when you don’t want to run around carjacking and killing people, including excellent new mini-games like golf and tennis that could hold their own against full-fledged sports titles. Or if you still want the thrill of gunplay, you can even go hunting, which is sort of like killing people in the game, only your targets are smaller and more agile. But still, you can’t ski.

Why does that even matter? For many GTA fans, it doesn’t. And there are a probably a lot of compelling reasons why Rockstar, which spent five years and more than a quarter billion dollars to make the game, chose to leave it out, weather being chief among them. I don’t even like to ski in real life, so I might side with Basil on this one anyways.

Nevertheless, this absence speaks to a lie at the heart of a game like GTA V. You can’t ski because Rockstar didn’t create a world in which something is meant for skiing. It could be anything—hugging, cooking, twerking. They’re all not there. What you’re left with after all is said and done at the golf course or on the yoga mat is a world operating under two core modalities: driving and killing, often at the same time.

It’s just that stealing and killing never felt this good. Los Santos may not be a “living world” per se, but it uses the instruments of life better than any game before it. Everything about the city shimmers with possibility — places to go, people to see, all virtual handles meant to be grasped and violently, playfully shaken. I got lost for hours at a time wandering down quiet corners of the city, chasing after little question marks on the map that invited players to meet eccentric characters politely labels “strangers and freaks.” These can be comic, such as when Michael accidentally smokes a joint and goes a bad trip involving space aliens, or painfully heartfelt, like operating the tow truck of Franklin’s drug-addled uncle. Either way, they turn Los Santos into a rich novel unfolding at your fingtertips.

Too often, however, this means it’s hard to do anything but mayhem. At one point when I was playing as Michael, I walked up to the front door of the fictional version of the FBI (called FIB, get it?) headquarters in search of a man meant to give me a story mission. I accidentally bumped into a passer-by, who responded by punching me. Nothing afforded diplomacy in this situation, no “apology” button to press, so I did the only thing I could. Next thing I knew, I was sprinting away from the cops. I didn’t get back to that mission until the next day, and I made sure to avoid large crowds of people after that. This made the game more manageable, but left me feeling strangely isolated. For a game that promised me freedom, I was inexplicably trapped.

This is a point GTA’s many alarmist critics miss: as the series has aged, so too has its appetite for destruction. As the weight of GTA’s immense and almost-living world bears down on you, violence is no longer a casual endeavor. More than that, the game just feels dense. It’s impossible to walk down the streets of Los Santos without being assaulted by countless distractions, from crazy people shouting at you on the street to the buzzing of your own mobile phone (yes, you can take selfies in GTA V) asking you to invest in a new stock or come meet someone for a loot drop. Your relation with these characters — even the insane meth dealer Trevor — become fiercely intimate as you learn to navigate the mundane hazards of life in GTA V in your own unique way. When a work looks and feels this good, you have to wonder if soon video games will be less about playing, and more simply being.

And who do you want to be in such a world? As the Wall Street Journal reported last month, a new generation of “empathy games” struggle with profoundly human issues — alcoholism, depression, family illness — rather than the meanderings of psychopaths. To be truly human, you have to be able to interact nonviolently, to be able to walk up to the door of a major office building without getting punched in the face. Gamers clearly want this; why else would they “embark on a nonkilling spree?” It’s a sign that Michael, a not-so-reformed bank robber who forms the moral center of the game, always seems to find himself in therapy after his most exciting missions.

“I just don’t like myself very much doc,” he blurts early in the game.